PORTFOLIO: Namaste America, Nepal/USA

NAMASTE AMERICA: from Bhutan to USA 

[2009-2018] 

Bordering China to the north and India to the south, this kingdom is home to about 600,000 people. In 1974, the king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, (1974-2006) announced the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as the country’s new philosophy of economic and social development. He believed that the happiness of his people was much more important than the country’s Gross Domestic Product. But in the late 80s, in order to re-enforce a sense of national identity, the King of Bhutan imposed the rule of “One nation, One people” in which the dress code and the official behavior had to be respected by every Bhutanese citizen. As a result, in the 90s, the Lhotshampas, an ethnic group of Nepali origin who had been called on by the Kingdom a century ago, to cultivate land in the south of the country, were expelled. As a minority speaking Nepali and practicing Hinduism, they represented a threat to the Kingdom. In total one sixth of the Bhutanese population became refugees with 107.000 of them settling in camps in Nepal. In November 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) began to roll out a large resettlement in which the majority of refugees were to migrate to the United-States with the remaining refugees leaving for Denmark, Norway, Canada, Netherlands and Australia. In 2009, I followed one family, the Mainalis, from their last weeks in the camp to their first tentative steps on American soil, in Dallas. In March 2018 I returned to Dallas: between an enforced destiny and the American dream, the Mainali family is among the seventy thousand refugees welcomed on average each year in the United States so far. In 2019, 90.000 bhutanese refugees live in the United-States.